MYSTERY V.C.

Pelorus Guardian and Miners' Advocate., Volume 30, Issue 60, 2 August 1918, Page 3

MYSTERY V.C.

CAPTAIN’S ASTONISHING STORY.

Another version of how the naval officer known as the ‘Mystery V.C.’ won his decoration is given in the astonishing story of the captain of a ship recently in British waters.

An American paper a month or two ago lifted the veil of mystery and told a romantic story, strikingly similar in its details, to one of the experiences of Michael Lanyard, Louis J. Vance’s Lone Wolf, of how the mystery V.C., torpedoed in the North Sea, swam round until he was lifted up to the deck of a submarine, and how then he stood at the conning tower and with his waterproof pistol shot the captain and held the remainder of the crew at bay until the arrival of a British destroyer settled all the hopes of the Huns to escape.

As wonderful as that story is—and if it were true it would be as strange as fiction—it is less thrilling and less wonderful than the story told to Sydney “Sun” last week by a captain of the mercantile marine, fresh from the scene of naval activity, a story which, he says, is popularly accepted as the feats performed by the man whose grand work will not be chronicled until the war is over, if then.

The stage of the drama was an old barque, and the cast was small —the captain, an officer or two, a small crew, and the captain’s wife and child. They cruised round aimlessly inviting attack. Suddenly in the distance the surface of the water was broken by the periscope of an enemy submarine and in a few moments the U-boat was alongside and the captain of the sailing boat was ordered to stop and the crew to take to the boats.

The drama then developed.

The English captain pleaded with the German. “But,” he said, “would you east my poor wife and child adrift in an open boat in this weather ?”

The captain’s wife—an exceedingly comeli-looking womanclasped her child to her breast and moved towards her husband.

The U-boat captain insolently stared.at her.

“But my child will die,” the captain pleaded. “There is nothing for it.” “Can’t you take her on board with you ?” the captain of the barque asked, hesitatingly, as if the idea pained him. The U-boat captain started. Such a solution of the difficulty had not appeared to him. She was a surprisingly fine-looking woman to travel on a barque in such dangerous quarters, and something more than chivalry prompted his eager acceptance of the proposal. The crew thereupon lowered a boat, the captain’s wife was carefully helped into it, the captain and the crew followed, and the men rowed to the U-boat.

With unusual care the woman was helped by the captain to the deck of the submarine, and to the conning tower, then to the trapdoor, and she was even told to be careful of the step.

Then the climax off the drama occurred.' The captain’s wife, who was painfully nervous, stumbled. She shrieked, and the baby fell from her arms through the hatch of the U-boat to the bottom of the ladder.

Simultaneously the woman showed remarkable athletic powers. Pushing the captain aside, she lept overboard, and even as she cleared the deck of the boat. Before the startled Hun could appreciate what had occurred, there was a terrific explosion, the bottom was blown out of the enemy’s craft, and the boat sunk rapidly. The captain’s wife was rescued by her friends, who were breathlessly awaiting the explosion, and they were back in the barque a few minutes after the U-boat had disappeared. The captain’s wife was the mystery V.C.—a handsome young man of 28, who made up into a j feminine of so striking beauty, that the head of the U-boat captain was turned. The baby was a most powerful bomb, lovingly and carefully clothed in a thick shawl. The party sailed the sea until night-fall—apparently an easy victim to the torpedoes of the enemy. Three more U-boats hailed them. Three times the dialogue about the woman and the child was repeated, and three times the ruse succeeded. Three babies fell down three hatchways, and three U-boats went, with all hands, to the bottom of the North Sea.

The originating brain of this re-

markable plan to defeat the cruellest foe the navy was called upon to face was a well-known London actor, brother of the Mystery V.C. The V.C. had made a name for himself amongst a limited circle of friends as an amateur actor, but this magnificent series of heroic actions, played in a great drama of death, transcended all his other efforts. No V.C. was ever more nobly earned.